Marc Fromm <Marc.Fromm@wwu.edu> writes:
> I am trying to run commands from the shell (without becoming the postgres user first), which work fine on our live
server,but on our dev server I receive FATAL authentication errors.
> [root@dev tmp]$ createdb -U postgres lan_portal
> createdb: could not connect to database postgres: FATAL: Ident authentication failed for user "postgres"
The -U option is just about entirely useless under "ident sameuser"
authentication, which apparently is what you are using. If you like
ident auth in general, you can make it do what you want by setting
up a map file that lets (eg) root become any of a list of postgres
user names. Or you could switch to some other auth method. See
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/client-authentication.html
regards, tom lane